One of the overlooked benefits of the Williams tutorial — in which pairs of students meet for intense, hour-long sessions with a professor each week — is not what it does for the students, but for the faculty member.

“To try a new format at this stage of one’s career
is totally fun and energizing,”

said English Professor Peter Murphy, who relished his first opportunity to teach a tutorial last fall after 23 years in the classroom.

Murphy used the opportunity to try an experiment in looking at his main academic intersect — 18th and 19th century literature. His course, Romantic Experiments (English 331T), is structured much differently than a usual lecture survey or seminar. Each week, the students read a work of poetry from between 1780 and 1830 that featured a poet trying to think of new ways of making his or her point.

“One of the things I’ve done to keep things happening in my teaching is to change the angle on the material,” he said. “This is a way to do Romantic poetry in a slightly different way.”

Each of the works on the syllabus, Murphy said, is “gripping,” “baffling,” and a little strange. They include William Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan,” and poems by William Blake.

The format for the course was similar to most other tutorials. In his case, he had ten students — none of which, incidentally, had taken a tutorial before. He paired them off, and they would meet for an hour in his office once a week. For each session, one student would prepare a five to six page paper, and his or her partner would prepare a rebuttal. Murphy said having the students read the papers aloud was an important part of the process.

“If you read it aloud it really has to make sense,”

he said. “The way it dramatizes argument is wonderful. The format itself is pedagogically very powerful.”

Susannah Emerson ’12 was inspired to take the course based on a previous experience in Murphy’s Introduction to the Novel, a large lecture course. She said the tutorial “revolutionized my relationship to literature.”

“That sounds silly, but I do mean it,” she said. “I reevaluated my responsibilities as a reader, and took profound delight in going to class.”

Emerson said her favorite text was Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” for which it was her turn to write a paper. “I was entirely unaware of how exceptionally bizarre Blake, and in particular this poem — if it even is a poem — are,” she said.

“I would liken preparing for that paper to walking past a series of funhouse mirrors where no reflection is stationary and no body parts fit together,” she said. “I also have never had such a satisfying and palpable breakthrough, and have never been more proud of my thinking.”

Emerson said Murphy let the student chose what they wanted to discuss in their papers and the rebuttal, “and from there the two of us would discuss what we found interesting and exciting, or what we disagreed upon.” As the conversation continued, the professor would interject, usually with pointed questions that Emerson said “unfailingly clarified — and when appropriate complicated — our arguments and opinions.”

Murphy said he deliberately kept his distance in the early stages of each class to let the students find their own way. “You try not to talk,” he said, which got the message home to the students very quickly about where the onus of the course would be. “They couldn’t come in not ready to go.”

Emerson said she appreciated that approach. “He let us set the pace and tone of each session,” she said. “In doing so, he implied that our opinions were worthwhile, that we could teach ourselves and even that our contributions could further his own understanding.

“For any student, that is a quite a powerful feeling.”

And the feeling was, in its way, mutual. “It’s been inspiring,” Murphy said.

The reading list includes:

• William Wordsworth: The “Lucy” Poems and “The Ruined Cottage”
• Samuel Taylor Coleridege, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan”
• John Keats, selected poems
• William Blake, “Songs of Innocence and Experience” and “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
• George Gordon, Lord Byron, “Don Juan”

By Christopher Marcisz for the Williams College Office of Public Affairs

Header image: “Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon” by Caspar David Friedrich